The types of the constructor and destructor are not quite what we might expect. Traditionally a C++ constructor or destructor does not return a value, however on ARM things are different – the constructor returns a pointer to class A, and the destructor returns a pointer to void.

Why is this the case? On ARM constructors and destructors are specified differently in order to provide scope for optimizing calls to a chain of constructors or destructors while minimizing the pushing stack frames (tail call optimization). There’s a very helpful document available here called the C++ ABI for the ARM Architecture which details the differences between the ARM ABI and the Generic GNU C++ ABI including this little quirk.